BLE receiver-transmitters

Question

I'd like to have suggestions on this new project that I'm trying to develop.

My project will be made of two components: the receiver and many transmitters.

The receiver keeps listening for near transmitters, and when one is discovered, some business logic will trigger in accordance to the identified beacon. The trasmitter will be a small device, with the size of a key ring, that has a button that triggers the dispatch of the identification signal. Both the receiver and the transmitter use Bluetooth Low Energy technology.

A real case scenario: a person approaching a certain location, will push the button of the transmitter to be recognized as customer so that the system will offer some service.

I think that for the receiver, the Raspberry Pi device is the right way to follow. I've found a Raspberry Pi distribution that offers the functionality of receiving incoming beacon ids.

What about the transmitter? Do you have any suggestion on the best platform to use, both for the receiver and the transmitter?

Thank you in advance for any help.

NB

Answer 1

For the transmitter, there are many options available. you can use some from Nordic Semiconductors nRF51822 DK. you can use and program it using Segger Programmer without using their mother boards although you will have to provide external power on few pins.

https://www.nordicsemi.com/eng/Products/Bluetooth-Smart-Bluetooth-low-energy/nRF51822-Development-Kit

It also contains a USB dongle which can be used as both debug mode (using wireshark) or can be programmed as transmitters just like other modules that come with it. It contains in built programmer. The example scripts provided by Nordic provides enough for these to be configured into Transmitter.

Additionally, you can also use RPi to configure any cheap Bluetooth Dongle as Transmitters. The internet has many tutorials for that.

For Receiver, You can find many find solutions at radiusnetworks and switchdoclabs

Then you can use GPIO or any other function that you may want to perform.

Hope that helps.